Most recent stories

Have You Seen This Girl ?

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And it struck me. You needed to be on the side of a milk carton. 2 percent of course.

Pink

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Frank cut the tip of his finger off and it sort of shot over to the lettuce bin. The blood pumped out in tiny jets as he covered it with the palm of his other hand and ran to the sink. He pointed it in the sink and turned the water on, he could see…

Valley Rugstore

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He hunched low and forward on his bike, his 14-year old self, flying down the dusty back roads of this Great Midwestern Land, his head full of the smell of the algebraic girl he sat behind in math class just hours ago.

The Clock Man's Trouble

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A lowing cow cracked open the darkened room like the yawn of a gravid alien.

A Tall Order

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There was something about her eyes that he couldn't shake. He stood in line, waiting for his chicken finger tenders and one large size 32 oz. cola. No salad (a childhood aversion he had never abandoned), and no mashed potatoes. Friday night and the eve

The Lottery Ticket, First 20 pages of a novel excerpt

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SO ABOUT TEN minutes later Heidi arrived at the house with her boyfriend in tow, looking as if she had stepped out of an MTV music video, her black leather jacket loaded with sequins and silver studs, her blonde hair now colored green, all frizzy and unke

A Disobedient Hand

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And so peace returned, harmony restored, I set out to achieve the highest limits of academic excellence. Presently, my nose began to itch.

Saturday Night at the Yeti Fight

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“What part of ‘only bettors can watch the Yeti fight’ do you not understand?!”, he yelled. “Either place a bet or get the hell out of here!” I begrudgingly gave him all of the money I had on me, about two hundred, and placed it on Demonio B

Exchange Rates for Zynga

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As with the trouble with gambling, I managed to spend beyond my self-suggested limit at the farm while wanting to do little else. It became a chase for "money" (numbers like rubles) ...

Music Box

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Katie loved butterflies. Katie loved daisies. Mainly, Katie loved presents.

Archaeology

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I would like to go back (with spade, pick, soft bristles), and sift through time and layers, brush away the intervening years, and find: the tooth, knocked out by my then best friend, when we were seven, careening downhill in my father's wheelbarrow on Boscobel…

Bad Boys, Bad Boys, 2

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I ran into Geary Marston in front of the French Hotel Café, across the street from Chez Panisse. I was sitting outside at a small round metal table. A girl that looked like a Degas model was selling flowers on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Her shor

Shorty

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“They’re not gonna shoot him?” Rick cried.

Multiple Simultaneous Submissions

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He looked at the receiver in his hand as it hummed its dead-line song. His hand shook. Shit, he thought.

Matchbox Car

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Clatters and clatters ensued, and the splash destroyed all denial.

An Ancient Symbol for Fire

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If you could look out to either side of you, you'd see the signs. Restricted Area, Danger Keep Out.

The Hunt

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I bought the goldfish at different pet shops out of town, a few at a time, until I had two hundred or more in the freezer.

Propped Up

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Christmas Muzak was piped through to every store in the shopping mall. Giant red velvet bows adorned reproduction Victorian gaslights. Yards of glittered cotton pretended to be snow. A Santa rang a brass bell.

The Miracle

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On the way to the drinking fountain, Elysia Martin, a third grader at St. Michael's Parochial School, heard a voice calling her name. When she turned toward the white plaster statue of the Virgin Mary that sat between twin hedges in the rose garden, she

Scattering like light

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He had long since quit listening to the incessant clanging of the bell. He stood, ringing the bell, squinting into the setting sun, nauseous from the car exhaust, his body aching for alcohol.

Shopping Mall Santa

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The punk boys are my favorite. They come with an attitude, the piercings and the chains and the baggy pants with their underwear hanging out. I’m a punk myself, I tell them. The long white hair and beard? They’re real, my friend.

Bad Boys, Bad Boys, 1

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My wife and I were sitting at the bar at Brennan’s down on 4th Street one night, drinking too much without eating. Geary had convinced us to come down there with him, for two reasons. One, to give us the lowdown on where to stay and what to do in New Yo

One-Way Ticket

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Margaret and I are going to Chicago. Everything we do this morning feels final, as if we are doing it for the last time, which is probably true.

Zero

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My round belly is deflating. I disappear a little more by the day. It's been weeks. Soon, I may not even be here.

On the Empire Builder

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Naked American Apparel models romp with elk and antelope, and the Ghost of Richard Nixon directs traffic with the grace of a Wounded Hyena.

Two Weeks After the Shadow

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Two weeks after the shadow shows up in Stephen's x-ray, you decide to do something about the bucket in the garden. You start by wedging it underneath the faucet in the back yard so tightly that it pushes against the pipe with the groan of grinding metal. Now the hose is…

The Sad History of the Tearless Onion

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Matthias Fenstermacher loved onions, but hated slicing them, and so he labored to produce a tearless variety. His first attempt was indeed tearless--instead of weeping, the slicer was overcome by fits of uncontrollable giggles. The potential hazard was

While We Fuck

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When you push my bra down, so it rests uncomfortably beneath my breasts—your teeth dragging pink trails across my throat and shoulders, pushing your thumb and forefinger into my panties—you don't say that you love me. You say, “Jesus shit. Relax, baby,…

Kingfish

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Time stole you from underneath the goldendock. Writhing there, slick as a flapping tongue;lips gored, red, whose gaping could embolden weak hands behind the blazing buck blade, long ago pierced in your summer quietus, beneath the soft shade of a tackle box, as the…

But, I Did

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I read the runes, the cards, the signs, the sticks. I consulted tarot cards and read tea leaves. I listened to you, deconstructed every word and look and tone with the harshest logic and cynicism I could muster. If there was some way to decipher what you